By SEPKOLIN WALNE
State Enterprise Minister William Duma has blamed past governments for contributing to PNG Power’s current woes.
“The failure of many governments in the past to facilitate a transition to sustainable energy sources has contributed to our current situation,” Mr Duma told the Petroleum and Energy Conference in Port Moresby today.
“When the Marape-Rosso Government took office in 2022, it focused on increasing funding to improve infrastructure, enhance the working conditions for employees, and support suppliers while accommodating the growing population,” Mr Duma said.
“Our Government has set an ambitious goal to achieve at least 70 per cent electrification for our population by 2030, to reach universal electrification by 2050.
“While some may think this is a challenging task, we firmly believe it is achievable.
“These are significant challenges we have set for our country and there have been positive steps forward in increased investment in infrastructure.
“The Marape-Rosso Government has approved a huge power security plan.
“This initiative aims to enhance revenue and decrease costs, particularly concerning diesel fuel generators.
“It focuses on improving management practices and restoring and modernising infrastructure across the country, including various centres,” Mr Duma said.
He added that digital power generation was unsustainable from both economic and environmental perspectives.
“While it is crucial to increase electricity distribution to our communities, we must also be mindful of the global push to reduce emissions,” Minister Duma said.
Privatisation will only make a lot of employees redundant resulting in joblessness during this hard economic times and only hider the performances of PNG Power. PNG Power and all other State Owned Etherprises (SOEs) do not require structural changes to improve performances but are in dare need of cultural changes. Over the past decades many Boards and Managements made structural changes and anticipated to see improvements in performances but the performances continued to deter to this day. These all boil down to the legacy issues that were inherited since coprotization of these entities in early 2000.
Looking at the organizational cultures of all the State Owned Enterprises in PNG, these are no different to the cultures of Public Sector that is riddled with complacency and corruption. For instance, attitudes of employees at the work place such as Clocking at work between 9am to 10 am, knocking off early during lunch breaks, return to work after lunch hour after 2pm, early knock off from work before official business hour, absenteeism from work without proper leave requests, doing private works during official hours, expecting briberies from clients to get official job requests done, all management to ground level in organization always looking for means and ways to milk the organization, etc… the list is never ending. These are the common behaviors of all public service machinery and all the employees of State Owned Enterprises. How do you expect improvements in performances when the workforce is complacent? Workforce is the engine of these organizations. You cannot drive a car when its engine is ceased. Likewise, you cannot drive all the organizations (both public sector and SOEs) to their desired performance targets when their engine (workforce) is ceased. What is required now is a complete overhaul of the engine (employees performances) to drive change in the organizational cultures to see real change. Right now PNG Power and other SOEs and the entire Public sector need cultural changes and not structural changes as been the tradition in the past. Government need to place the right drivers in the driver’s seat to see real changes in those organizations. I have seen overall performances of all employees of Internal Revenue Commiossioner (IRC) improved since Sam Koim was appointed Commissioner. Now you will come to notice that employees avoid briberies for their paid jobs whilst serving their clients unlike other Public Sector organizations and SOEs. Even their response time to thie clients have dramatically improved unlike before. We need similar fundamental changes all across all SOEs and Public sector if we really want to see meaningful changes. It is the matter of placing right drivers (leaders) at the driver’s seat.
Minister Duma’s statement is all bullshit and swallow your own words. Citizens never experienced power issues very very badly with the past government. You must resign like it not
Minister Duma you need to resign from SOE ministry post
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